Recently Tom Bereknyei (a Steering Committee member) joined Anduril and that led to controversy both on Discourse and Matrix, so we’re releasing a public statement in response.
We do believe that all members of the Steering Committee must publicly disclose changes to their employer but we do not believe that Tom was at fault here. Candidates for the Steering Committee are required to disclose any potential conflicts of interest when they run for office, and Tom informed us ahead of the change in employment but currently there is no living document for Steering Committee members to formally register or update their employer with the Nix organization (which we were working on fixing before Tom joined Anduril and that will be ready soon).
However, we do not believe that any such registry of our employers would have quelled this controversy even if it had already existed and Tom had kept it up-to-date. Some members of the community seemed to expect extra public engagement from the Steering Committee on this issue beyond quietly updating some page.
So we’re here to say that we do not believe that Tom joining Anduril delegitimizes his position on the Steering Committee nor does it invalidate the votes of people who voted for him during the previous election. More generally, we do not want to set a precedent that any change of employer (even a controversial employer like Anduril) imperils a Steering Committee member’s standing. Our current governance already has the following checks in place to protect against any potential for abuse:
- Steering Committee members regularly recuse themselves from votes on matters where they have a conflict of interest
- The Steering Committee can expel a member by majority vote if the change in employer violates the Constitutional Conflict of Interest Balance requirement
- The Steering Committee can expel a member by supermajority vote for any reason at all
- The electorate can vote on their desired Steering Committee members during elections
— SC